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(Josiah Quincy Elementary School)

Molly Shugrue.

By Jeremy C. Fox, Town Correspondent

The headmaster of Chinatown’s Josiah Quincy Elementary School announced Friday that the schools’ auditorium would be dedicated in honor of Mary Elizabeth “Molly” Shugrue, a former student who died after suffering a seizure in 2008.

Shugrue grew up on Beacon Hill and attended the Quincy School from 1989 – 1993, where she discovered a passion for the stage as a member of the school’s Chinese Dance Troupe, Headmaster Simon Ho said in a statement. She later attended Boston Latin School before transferring to the Dublin School in New Hampshire, where she was a co-valedictorian, according to a Boston Globe obituary.

Shugrue was an artist who began studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts as a teenager, having already studied dance and acted in children’s productions. She was attending Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. when, after the death of a grandmother, she began to exhibit symptoms of schizoaffective disorder, a mental illness that caused a series of setbacks to her artistic ambitions.

Her sudden death at age 26 came after a seizure on Jan. 7, 2008. Her mother, Duxbury resident Page Hurley Shugrue, told the Globe at the time that she believed her daughter forgot to take an anti-seizure medication that countered the powerful side effects of the other drugs prescribed to manage the symptoms of her disorder.

The Quincy School will dedicate the auditorium in Shugrue’s honor at a ceremony at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 13.